Congratulations to Grace Ellis ‘25, winner of the Norman Holmes Pearson Prize and the Walter McClintock Prize for her essay, “Revising the Nation: Tribal Sovereignty and the American History Textbook, 1929-2002. Each year, the American Studies department awards the Holmes Pearson for the best senior project in American Studies, while the History department awards the McClintock for the best undergraduate essay on a topic in the history or culture of the North American West.
Grace’s essay examines Indigenous representation in twentieth-century American history textbooks and contends that central to teaching American exceptionalism was a pervasive, destructive mythology about Native peoples. This mythology not only erased Indigenous genocide and dispossession but elided how tribal nations have survived under settler colonialism and shaped American culture. A comparative study, Grace’s essay contrasts the most popular U.S. history textbook of the late twentieth century, The American Pageant, against textbooks authored by Choctaw historical Muriel H. Wright. Long after scholars called for a “new Indian history” in the 1970s, The American Pageant framed Native peoples as antitheses to modernity and nation-building. Yet, as early as 1929, Wright centered the Five Tribes in her Oklahoma history textbooks, delineating Indigenous nations as essential to the American story. “Revising the Nation” contributes to scholarship on the pedagogical mechanations of settler colonialism - and points to the need for further study of how Native intellecturals retooled education to sustain tribal sovereignty in the twentieth century.
Grace also received an honorable mention for the 2025 Library Map Prize, which is awarded to a senior for the best use of maps in a senior essay.